HGST debuts new, helium filled hard disk drive platform

HGST, formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a Western Digital company, announced on Thursday a new helium-filled hard disk drive (HDD) platform, which is at the forefront of advanced technology for increasing capacity and significantly reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) for enterprise and cloud customers.

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With products expected in 2013, the new platform enables HGST to go beyond its five-platter design, providing a path for higher capacity storage and lower customer TCO for years to come. With various challenges in scaling current areal density technologies, this new platform allows HGST to design seven-platter drives in a standard 3.5-inch form factor that will cost-effectively extend the capacity and cost-per-gigabyte curve for many product generations to come. In addition, the inherent benefits of the platform, including the helium fill, allow HGST to improve data center TCO on virtually every level: capacity, power, cooling and storage density.
With the explosion of data resulting from mobile devices, Internet services, social media and business applications, corporate, cloud and big data customers are constantly looking for ways to improve their storage infrastructure costs and their bottom line. The new storage models, such as cold storage, are evolving in ways that require enormous amounts of data to be stored and available within a moment’s notice. These hyperscale datacenters must deploy massive amounts of storage with the best TCO to help them manage their costs and growing storage needs. And when it comes to TCO, numbers matter most – cost-per-terabyte, watt-per-TB, TB-per-system weight and TB-per-square foot.
The density of helium is one-seventh that of air, delivering significant advantages to HGST’s sealed-drive platform. The lower density means dramatically less drag force acting on the spinning disk stack so that mechanical power into the motor is substantially reduced. The lower helium density also means that the fluid flow forces buffeting the disks and the arms, which position the heads over the data tracks, are substantially reduced allowing for disks to be placed closer together (i.e., seven disks in the same enclosure) and to place data tracks closer together (i.e., allowing continued scaling in data density). The lower shear forces and more efficient thermal conduction of helium also mean the drive will run cooler and will emit less acoustic noise.
“The benefits of operating a HDD with helium fill have been known for a long time. The breakthrough is in the product and process design, which seals the helium inside the HDD enclosure cost effectively in high-volume manufacturing,” said Steve Campbell, chief technology officer at HGST. “We are excited about the introduction of this platform, which demonstrates HGST technology leadership and is the result of more than six years of development in materials science, mechanical engineering and process technology. Thanks to the hard work of our research and engineering teams, our initial pilot lines are up and operational, putting HGST in position to introduce this technology first into the market.”
“As a technology innovator, HGST continues to invest in multiple R&D efforts that will help us win new customers, gain deeper market penetration and deliver a significant return on investment for our customers,” said Mike Cordano, president of HGST. “Our new breakthrough platform delivers unprecedented innovation with new features optimized to meet the performance, scalability, efficiency and TCO demands of both corporate and cloud datacenters, which could not be achieved using conventional techniques. With these improvements, customer interest has been positive and we look forward to qualifying our new drives in 2013.”
The new, helium-filled sealed-drive platform is being demonstrated at the Western Digital Investor event in Irvine, California. At the event, HGST is comparing the power consumption between a helium-filled drive and an equivalent air-filled drive side-by-side, demonstrating a reduction in power consumption for the helium-filled drive of 23 percent. Taking into account the extra capacity coming from two additional disks, the improvement in watts-per-TB is 45 percent. In addition to consuming less power, the drive operates four degrees Celsius cooler, requiring less cooling in the system rack and data center. This reduction in power and associated cooling cost significantly contributes to the lower TCO of the helium-filled platform. The critical watt-per-TB metric will further improve over time as the helium-filled drive platform enables significantly higher drive capacities in future product generations.
HGST will release specific capacities points and product specifications when the platform launches in 2013.

WD announces thinnest 2.5-inch hybrid hard drive for notebook PCs

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WD, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., announced on Monday that it is sampling a 5mm-thin hard disk drive featuring hybrid technology. WD has developed hard drives slim enough for integration into thin notebook PCs, which provide high-capacity storage and robustness while featuring instant-on and application performance similar to today’s client solid state drives (SSDs). The new technologies will be showcased during WD’s Investor Day, Sept. 13, 2012.
“Mobile devices are becoming smaller, thinner, lighter and more responsive,” said Matt Rutledge, vice president of client storage solutions at WD. “Working with our technology partners, WD has developed new 5 mm hard drives that enable high capacity storage along with excellent performance and superior economics to allow our customers to expand their thin offerings.”
With device volumetric efficiency a key concern for system makers, WD began shipping 7 mm height hard drives for thin-profile notebooks earlier this year (historically, standard notebook hard drives have been 9.5 mm). WD 5 mm hybrid hard drives will enable the market’s thinnest computers to offer 500 GB of capacity, utilizing almost 50 percent less volume compared to current 9.5 mm hard drives and at one tenth the cost of similar capacity SSDs.
“Acer is partnering with WD to bring advanced notebook performance and capacity in the smallest form factor,” said David Lee, associate vice president of Mobile Computing Product business unit at Acer. “It’s a part of our ongoing commitment to present leading technology that ultimately improves the total user experience of our customers.”
“We are seeing a shift in the computing world to more powerful mobile computing solutions,” said SY Shain, senior vice president of ASUS’ notebook business unit. “With this in mind, ASUS and WD are collaborating to create slimmer and more mobile notebook solutions — without sacrificing capacity or performance — to deliver smaller form-factor to consumers.”
WD’s hybrid technology pairs MLC NAND flash storage for fast SSD-like data throughput and instant-on responsiveness with magnetic disks for efficient, high-capacity storage. Similar to the practice of multi-million dollar enterprise systems, WD’s hybrid technology utilizes the concept of tiered storage. Data accessed most frequently (often referred to as ‘hot’ data) is managed using speedy NAND flash to ensure fast response times, while data accessed less often (‘cold’ data) resides on the robust magnetic disks.
The tiered design of hybrid hard drives, compared to current dual-drive solutions, also provides a redundancy benefit for users. The magnetic disk backs up all files residing in the NAND, protecting the user from inevitable NAND wear and preserving it for the more hot data handling. WD’s hybrid technology works in conjunction with the PC operating system to deliver higher performance than current hybrid offerings while minimizing NAND wear to allow the use of less expensive MLC NAND.
Hybrid hard drives combine NAND flash and magnetic disks, simplifying storage-element integration for OEM customers and providing a host of end user benefits: superior performance, responsiveness, lower power consumption, greater operating shock tolerance, and data protection. And unlike dual-drive designs, WD’s hybrid technology provides single-unit design homogeneity that OEM system manufacturers have long sought from the storage industry.

ProfitBricks debuts virtual data center, IaaS for enhanced cloud computing performance and cost

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ProfitBricks, an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) company that has reengineered the delivery of cloud computing, announced on Monday general availability of the next generation of cloud computing services in North America.
Reinventing legacy cloud infrastructure architecture and performance, ProfitBricks offers live vertical scaling of CPU cores and RAM - never before has adding resources for an instance (or virtual machine) been possible without requiring a server reboot. ProfitBricks offers better performance with 227 percent greater UnixBench scores over Amazon AWS and 194 percent faster I/O than Rackspace. Customers benefit from transparent by-the-minute pricing, and better usability through a graphical data center interface.
“From our perspective, ProfitBricks is changing the competitive landscape for cloud providers by addressing many of the concerns holding us back from adopting the cloud. ProfitBricks is a game changer,” said Trevor Keith of T.K. Consulting. “The ability to adjust our cloud infrastructure resources on the fly, matched with up-to-the-minute pricing has had a positive and dramatic impact on how we deliver our applications to clients.”
For years cloud service providers required customers to preselect server sizes and add new servers as needed to scale. This horizontally scaled infrastructure required costly application rewrites and left data centers filled with orphaned servers. ProfitBricks’ IaaS platform enables customers to select server instances from 1 CPU core to 48 cores, and from 1GB of RAM to 196 GB of RAM. Additionally, all CPU cores at ProfitBricks are dedicated, they are not shared among customers.
With ProfitBricks’ virtualized network, built on InfiniBand technology, customers can replicate in our cloud infrastructure whatever they can do locally with patch panels and switches. With up to 8 ports per server, connection speeds 8x faster than Ethernet, plus free backend network connections, customers can build any network configuration they want. Users are no longer forced to adapt to their service provider, they have complete network freedom in the cloud.
The ProfitBricks Data Center Designer makes it easy to design and initiate your cloud environments. Drag-and-drop resources like a Visio diagram with all designs result in live provisioning when committed. The DCD makes ongoing management allowing the user to adjust resources with live scaling and instant provisioning. ProfitBricks offers simple and efficient billing that charges only for the resources that are actually consume minute-by-minute. Transparently based on only four parameters, pricing is simple and comprehensible. There aren’t any hidden or additional fees for things beyond control or measurability for the customer e.g. I/O access.
“We deconstructed cloud infrastructure down to its most basic elements and discovered there was a far better way to deliver the service,” said ProfitBricks’ chief executive officer, Achim Weiss. “We ended up reinventing the architecture, which allows us to offer substantially better performance and a new level of flexibility in cloud infrastructure. Our platform allows ProfitBricks to offer unprecedented services at prices others cannot touch because of legacy design and built-in costs.”
"Over the next few years, the IaaS industry and end user adoption will be fueled by improved performance, pricing, and ease-of use," said Melanie Posey, research vice president, hosting and managed network services, IDC. "However, the cloud infrastructure services market is quickly becoming crowded with "me-too" offerings that attempt replicate what the cloud giants have been providing for years. We're eager to see the next round of game-changing innovation in the cloud space."
“We test multiple performance metrics of the leading cloud providers and continually see ProfitBricks outperforming other providers – from I/O and networking to CPU and RAM access speeds,” said Kenny Li, President of Cloud Spectator.
“The architecture lets us open a new world of opportunity for business visionaries and IT budget watchers alike,” said ProfitBricks chief executive officer, U.S., Bob Rizika. “With the benefits of live vertical scaling, and a price/performance ratio that is unmatched, we are seeing growth from organizations with wide variations in processing demand that had traditionally been forced into one-size-fits-all server configurations and reactionary horizontal scaling.”

ForeScout Upping the Ante for IT Organizations Considering BYOD

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The research coverage speaks for itself. In response to news of ForeScout bringing mobile device management to network access control, 451 Research industry analyst Chris Hazelton wrote: "As IT needs to react to the mobile invasion, we see strong synergies between NAC and MDM to control the movement of corporate data across smartphones and Tablets. The goal is to provide a single console for IT to view network usage across desktop, smartphone and tablets. As companies face an invasion of employee-owned mobile devices, the ability to view who, and with what type of device, is connecting to enterprise data becomes increasingly important."
ForeScout, which provides an automated security control platform [see CounterACT review by CTR], is well known for its leadership position in the network access control (NAC) market. Since last year, it has been building up its arsenal to enable IT organizations to attain the same level of visibility and control with personal and managed mobile devices that security operators have with endpoints such as PC workstations, notebooks, servers and virtual machines leveraging NAC.
While the company’s flagship network security product, CounterACT, can identify and set basic policy for both managed and unmanaged mobile devices, the company delivered native mobile security capabilities for iOS and Android following the RSA show this past spring. As a complement to its NAC appliance, ForeScout’s Mobile Security Module adds lightweight and useful mobile device level security at an aggressive price. We interviewed a retailer prospect, who put this product on his most wanted list, saying “it was powerful enough, would have immediate value, conveniently works right within CounterACT, and it meets our budget.” The company also announced the means to integrate with leading mobile device management (MDM) products via an Integration Mobile.
Now ForeScout is upping its mobile security game by entering the MDM market, which Gartner predicts will grow by 21 percent over the next year to the tune of $1.9 billion. By partnering with Fiberlink and customizing the award-winning Maas360 solution, ForeScout is able to bring to market a mature, cloud-based MDM in the form of ForeScout MDM. The joint announcement claims that this is the first integrated NAC and MDM solution that “provides the level of management, visibility and control needed across all mobile devices, users, networks, applications and data.”
Indeed, ForeScout, the fastest growing NAC vendor in the space and among the top three players in the NAC market, appears to be more than just onto the next trend.
Following ForeScout’s Mobile announcement, Cisco announced similar plans to open its NAC product line to support third party MDM players. Other, smaller NAC vendors have also received a boost from BYOD. For example, Enterasys announced support for mobile devices while Bradford Networks announced some integration with Hewlett-Packard’s MDM.
“Companies can’t ignore BYOD, but are well aware of the risks and need for greater security measures. We want to provide customers the most flexibility to advance their mobile security capabilities wherever they sit with BYOD adoption. By offering NAC, native mobile security and MDM approaches, users can choose the right level of security at the right cost relative to the device, user, application and level of risk. It’s a ‘right-sized’ mobile security strategy that is resonating within the market and supported by all the leading market research firms,” said Scott Gordon, vice president of marketing at ForeScout.
The approach is certainly resonating with analysts such as Hazelton, who said: “The integration with MDM, and appropriating some of the capabilities of MDM, mean ForeScout can be used to deliver management and security to a set of employees that don't need or warrant full device management capabilities, such as mobile application provisioning and control. The ability to integrate MDM and NAC will allow different roles within IT to choose between using ForeScout's console or that of the incumbent MDM vendor. This meets IT's need for both simplicity and reduction in the need for training. We got a sneak peak at ForeScout's partner list among MDM vendors, and we like what we see so far.”
IT organizations are indeed hot for BYOD and mobile security, whatever the technology incarnation. Through its own innovation and by partnering with a variety of infrastructure vendors such as Maas360, ForeScout has been able to successfully win over large accounts against larger networking vendor incumbents and seems well positioned to offer a compelling package for BYOD for the mid-tier and Fortune 500.

It's a Lock: CipherCloud's Encryption Technology Offers Gateway to Security

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Many enterprise-sized companies, especially those that deal in highly sensitive data, such as medical, financial and health care organizations, understandably remain more than a little hesitant about moving to the cloud. Concerns relating to data privacy, residency, security and compliance undoubtedly remain top of mind when they entertain the dream of seamlessly transitioning to a cloud-based infrastructure.

CipherCloud is helping to transform that dream into more than just an altered state with its cloud data protection gateways for public and private clouds. The cloud encryption heavyweight is able to not only encrypt sensitive data in real time before its journey to the cloud but also maintain functionality, usability and performance in the process.

I recently spoke with Pravin Kothari, CipherCloud’s founder and CEO, about feeling truly secure, the importance of allowing customers to designate their own data protection schemes and why CipherCloud is feeling fairly validated these days.

Kim Borg: Would you please illuminate for our readers just how CipherCloud’s Gateway technology encrypts data in real time before it's sent to the cloud?

Pravin Kothari: Rather than relying on cloud providers to protect customer data, CipherCloud applies encryption, before sensitive data leaves the enterprise. CipherCloud is deployed as an in-line security gateway within the enterprise network that sits between the users and cloud applications. It offers multiple (National Institute of Standards and Technology-approved Advanced Encryption Standard-compatible encryption and tokenization options, including format-and-operations-preserving encryption algorithms.
Enterprises can identify which data they consider sensitive (such as proprietary information, personally-identifiable information or other regulated data). When that data is posted or updated into the cloud, we apply the selected encryption or tokenization method, on the fly, to protect that data before it leaves the enterprise network. We reverse the process when employees access the cloud application through the gateway, decrypting data in real time so the users see the actual data rather than the encrypted version that resides within the cloud. CipherCloud's highly secure encryption and tokenization preserves both the format and operations of the data, so that the cloud application remains operational but its real content remains locked within the enterprise.
KB: How does this technology secure sensitive customer data across multiple public and private cloud applications without impacting functionality or performance?

PK:The key to CipherCloud's success has been its extensible and scalable, plug-in based architecture. At the core, we provide critical cloud security capabilities such as encryption, tokenization, key management, malware detection, user activity monitoring, data protection APIs and more. We extend this platform by adding a layer of out-of-the-box connectors for several popular cloud applications and platforms such as Salesforce, Amazon, Force.com and Gmail.
The behavior and operations of each cloud application (for example, how is search performed, what are field length and format restrictions, etc.) is embedded into these connectors, which allows the CipherCloud gateway to protect data while respecting application functionality. Finally, CipherCloud provides an Open Connect API that makes it easy to extend the platform's capabilities to other cloud applications – including private clouds – using XML-based policy files that define the meta-data and context for the applications.
It's important to highlight that customers ultimately decide which fields need to be protected, under which circumstances, and using which controls. We provide more than a dozen data protection schemes to select from, each of which is tuned to handle varying cloud application operations and limitations.
Finally, due to its completely stateless architecture (no data or session is maintained on the gateway), CipherCloud is able to perform all transactions with near-zero latency.
KB: How significant is the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 197 accreditation CipherCloud recently received for its implementation of the Advanced Encryption Standard encryption algorithm?

PK: According to the NIST website, CipherCloud is the only company that offers AES-based format-and-operations-preserving encryption solutions for cloud services, such as Salesforce and Gmail, that has received the FIPS 197 accreditation. Reaching this certification achievement speaks to our mission to provide the industry’s most secure encryption solutions for our customers who are concerned about security, privacy and compliance of their sensitive data in the cloud.
We believe this certification presents new opportunities for us to serve enterprises and government organizations; whose policies don't allow for the implementation of proprietary encryption algorithms that are being offered by many vendors in the market today.
KB: How will this certification set apart CipherCloud from its closest competitors?

PK:The FIPS 197 accreditation provided by NIST validates CipherCloud's commitment to ensuring transparency and highest levels of security through third-party validations. Customers not only want to ensure that any cryptographic modules adopted by vendors meet industry standards, but also that their specific implementations in the product have been validated and certified by a recognized body such as NIST.
After all, a breach of sensitive data encrypted by such technologies can cause millions of dollars in damages. Unfortunately, some vendors often mislead customers with claims of FIPS compliance by simply embedding a FIPS-certified module into their products without any third-party validation around its implementation. Customers should verify such claims by checking for the vendor certification on NIST's website: http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/STM/cavp/documents/aes/aesval.html.
For more information about CipherCloud's cloud data protection gateways, check out www.ciphercloud.com.
Kim Borg is the Editorial Manager at Computer Technology Review. She can be reached at kim_borg@wwpi.com.

CounterACT 7.0 – NAC and BYOD Tool Gets Even Better

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Last year, I took a long look at ForeScout CounterACT, a Network Access Control platform, and I was
impressed. Now, with Version 7.0, I’m even more impressed. If I had responsibility for securing a medium-sized or even global enterprise network, CounterACT would be among the tools that I would strongly consider to be a must-have.
802.1x is one of only a few standards for device and user authentication, but it can be sheer drudgery to configure and manage in large, heterogeneous environments. The new version of CounterACT adds a wide range of 802.1x features, including an OpenRADIUS Server that is built into the product. The prior version of CounterACT only offered a proxy-mode, which was easy to set up, but by providing both proxy and built-in RADIUS approaches, there are more authentication options. For those who don’t have RADIUS, when you implement CounterACT, you will – and for those who do have RADIUS, CounterACT will give you a secondary RADIUS Server for high availability.
CounterACT makes Network Access Control (NAC) even more flexible and easier to manage than it was in the previous version. CounterACT offers alternative authentication methods for parts of your network that might not be ready for 802.1x or for systems that can’t support an 802.1x supplicant (agent software). You get the benefits of NAC right away while you migrate to 802.1x or merge different organizations or locations. For many, avoiding or reducing reliance on agents is the better alternative to 802.1x. Either way, CounterACT 7 covers it with extensive roles-based and device-based authorization and broad enforcement routes. Scalability also gets a boost from an updated Enterprise Manager that now manages up to 250 CounterACT appliances as one and a new CounterACT appliance that supports 10,000 devices.
CounterACT 6 came with a bunch of cookie-cutter templates plus a powerful policy engine if you wanted to get fancy – all presented in an elegant GUI. Version 7 adds usability features. Perhaps the visually most striking and readily handy feature is the new Tactical Map. This slick dashboard map (yes, actually using Google maps) shows, at a glance, the status of all connected devices. The administrator can drill down by location, logical group or issue type to quickly determine the status of any device. The map makes it even easier to manage and monitor one or multiple sites and thousands of endpoints. This extends the previous release that had presented list views with device status and action options.


Above: ForeScout CounterACT 7: Dashboard Tactical Map

While version 6 provided a real-time inventory of devices and many other endpoint details, version 7.0 offers more hardware information and the query function is made even more accessible. The search console appears to respond faster and now provides extremely diverse search options, with the ability to search based on single or multiple values, against data on all hosts, or by device selected, using one or more filters. For example, you can search for threats in a particular network segment, and can drill down to specific threats on specific devices. Alternatively, your interest may be in specific applications, patches, or compliance issues within organizational units. CounterACT makes searches easy and powerful – and the results can be exported.
Any discovered endpoint attribute is searchable and can be used in a NAC policy. For example, you can inspect and validate X.509 certificates to assure that all network connections are made only to devices with valid certificates. This helps protect the network from attacks by rogue systems using spoofed, expired, or incorrect certificates, as an added level of protection. Beyond search, reporting was also improved with an easier way to generate and manage reports.
“Bring your own device” (BYOD) security is of ever-increasing importance to organizations. Fortunately, CounterACT’s mobile capabilities are excellent. CounterACT can detect different mobile devices and apply any number of NAC policies, including guest management. CounterACT’s optional plug-in and mobile app (ForeScout Mobile) offers deeper inspection of iOS or Android devices. It can do an inventory and can enforce root detection, password strength, encryption, email and unwanted app policy – device violations can result in blocked or limited network access.
With ForeScout Mobile, you can go one step further and actually control some configuration of the device similar to that of a mobile device management (MDM) system. For example, with iOS devices, you can limit corporate WiFi access points, control corporate email access or even turn the camera off when connected to the corporate WiFi network. CounterACT doesn’t take ownership of the device, however. At the end of the day, the user can easily restore the previous device configuration. This plug-in also works with other MDMs – so you can see MDM-managed handhelds along with unmanaged and CounterACT-managed mobile devices on the same console.
On the whole, CounterACT offers a lot of useful features in a flexible package. With CounterACT 7.0, ForeScout has taken a solid access and endpoint security platform to greater heights – especially for IT managers who need to see and manage BYOD devices on their network.
Click here to read a review of ForeScout's CounterACT 6.4.
For more information, visit www.forescout.com/ITSJ2.
Mark Brownstein is a writer and editor, and has written for many leading technology publications. He has served as L.A. Bureau Chief at InfoWorld, Technology Editor at Network World, Senior Technology Editor at Network Magazine, and Executive Editor at Computer Technology Review. A networking and storage technologist and product reviewer, Mark has authored seven books and is a consultant. He can be reached at mark@brownstein.com.

Winchester Systems’ FlashServer HA-4200 achieves VMware Ready status

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Winchester Systems, provider of data storage and server products, announced on Wednesday that its FlashServer HA-4200 has achieved VMware Ready status. This designation indicates that after a detailed validation process FlashServer HA-4200 has achieved VMware's highest level of endorsement, and can be found on the VMware Solution Exchange (VSX).
Winchester Systems offers "purpose-built" data storage solutions for commercial and military applications that include servers, networking, storage and software combined with professional integration services. Storage offerings include FlashDisk RAID disk arrays in direct attached storage (DAS), network attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN) configurations. These tiered storage solutions offer a variety of SAS and SSD disks for Fibre Channel, SAS and iSCSI environments. FlashServer Intel-based servers include standard and high availability configurations.
"It is even more critical than ever that applications continue to run without data loss during hardware failures. FlashServer High Availability Servers run multiple virtual machines on a highly available physical machine that protects applications and data with redundant, auto-failover hot-swappable servers," said Mr. Jerry Namery, the company's chief technical officer.
"We are pleased that Winchester Systems and FlashServer HA-4200 qualifies for the VMware Ready™ logo, signifying to customers that it has met specific VMware integration and interoperability standards and it works effectively with VMware cloud infrastructure, which will speed time to value within customer environments." said Sheryl Sage, director, Alliance Programs, VMware.
The VMware Ready program is a co-branding benefit of the Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program that makes it easy for customers to identify partner products certified to work with VMware cloud infrastructure. Customers can use these products and solutions to lower project risks and realize cost savings over custom built solutions. With thousands of members worldwide, the VMware TAP program includes best-of-breed technology partners with the shared commitment to bring the best expertise and business solution for each customer need.
Winchester Systems and FlashServer HA-4200 can be found within the online VMware Solution Exchange (VSX).

QLogic announces adapter technology to simplify server-based SSD caching

QLogic announced this week new technology that seamlessly combines its storage area network (SAN) host bus adapter (HBA) technology with server-based, industry-standard solid-state drive (SSD) flash storage. The Mt. Rainier project brings server-based SSD caching performance to SAN storage, simplifying 

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deployment and management, while delivering scalable performance to I/O hungry applications running in single and clustered server environments.
Application performance has become a critical, competitive advantage for organizations and has a direct impact on customer satisfaction, service levels and overall business performance. Application-transparent and infrastructure- and storage subsystem-agnostic, Mt. Rainier delivers the application performance acceleration benefits of server-based SSDs without many of the limitations of current solutions.
The new innovations include simplified deployment and management with Mt. Rainier not requiring installation and management of separate drivers for I/O adapters, SSD cards and caching. The design uses only one QLogic driver per OS which simplifies installation and management, particularly for servers running multiple virtual machines and clustered applications. Mt. Rainier allows customers to connect different SSDs, including PCIe flash-based storage cards and industry-standard SAS SSDs. Mt. Rainier cache processing and SSD data management are offloaded from the server to the Mt. Rainier adapter, resulting in an application-transparent and operating system-independent server-based SSD caching solution that provides scalable acceleration of critical server applications without consuming additional server resources.
Many clustered enterprise applications and virtual server environments require shared storage resources. These applications typically cannot take advantage of server-based SSD solutions that utilize a direct-attached storage model because cached data is unavailable for sharing between multiple, physical servers. Mt. Rainier breaks the server captive cache model with a shared caching architecture that brings the benefits of server-based SSD performance acceleration to multi-server application configurations that benefit from the shared storage environments of SANs. It also offers synchronous peer-to-peer mirroring across two Mt. Rainier adapters protects against data loss and ensures high availability for mission-critical applications.
"Increased server performance, higher virtual machine density, growth in application clusters and more demanding business application workloads have created a critical I/O performance imbalance between servers, networks and storage subsystems," said Simon Biddiscombe, president and chief executive officer, QLogic. "Mt. Rainier builds on our leading market position and unique expertise in high performance data center connectivity to bring a new category of scalable, performance-enhancing solutions that are easy to deploy and address some of the most performance-challenged environments in the data center."
"Current caching solutions require separate device drivers for SAN HBAs, SSD cards, and additional caching filter drivers and software," said Shishir Shah, senior vice president and general manager, Storage Solutions Group, QLogic. "Mt. Rainier is flexible technology that seamlessly combines the benefits of server-based SSD caching with SAN-based storage using a standard QLogic driver. We've created a shared SAN resource model for industry-standard SSDs in the server that leverages existing SAN storage and infrastructure."
"Storage performance has long been one of the most pervasive challenges in the data center," said Jeff Boles, senior analyst at Taneja Group. "Over the past several decades, compute power has simply leapt past the ability of SAN storage to keep up. QLogic's Mt. Rainier defines a new technology category we call Server-based Storage Accelerators, in which HBAs cache SAN data on server-based SSD storage in a transparent, shared architecture. With QLogic's global presence and innovative architecture, Mt. Rainier could well become the de facto choice for solving I/O challenges in every data center."
Mt. Rainier technology will be initially deployed and managed as a traditional SAN HBA, providing connectivity to Fibre Channel SANs (10GbE, iSCSI and FCoE in the future).

Fujitsu’s NuVola private cloud platform certified with ImageWare biometric management software

Fujitsu Frontech North America Inc., provider of IT-based solutions, and ImageWare Systems Inc. , provider of multi-modal biometric security solutions, has announced certification on the NuVola Private

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Cloud Platform. The patented ImageWare multi-modal biometric management engine has been certified to allow rapid deployment of biometric security across NuVola Private Cloud Platform for the enterprise.
“We are very excited to certify ImageWare on the NuVola Private Cloud Platform, as their core biometric management engine enhances a critical function of NuVola: Security,” said Vic Herring, vice president of sales and marketing, Cloud Infrastructure Solutions Group at Fujitsu Frontech North America. “Noting the market concerns over cloud layer security, we feel ImageWare provides NuVola further differentiation with the addition of their biometric engine.”
On May 15, ImageWare finalized and released version 2.0 of its Biometric Engine (BE), a biometric authentication and identity management technology. BE 2.0 provides superior integration with legacy identity management solutions and enterprise service bus technologies, and is the only patented agnostic, open-architecture biometric recognition software solution that works with virtually all existing security hardware, software and algorithms.
“Working with Fujitsu and the NuVola Private Cloud Platform solution brings ImageWare to the private cloud with a global partner and a leading innovator in the IT space,” said Jim Miller, president and CEO of ImageWare Systems. “Being certified on Fujitsu represents the full convergence of Fujitsu’s leading server and storage technology, and our industry-leading multi-modal biometric management engine. We are proud to be part of the NuVola Private Cloud Platform and look forward to bringing cloud-ready biometric solutions directly to our customers.”

Qualstar unveils encryption key management for XLS Enterprise Tape Libraries

Qualstar Corp., a manufacturer of data security and archive storage solutions and high efficiency power supplies under the N2Power brand, announced Thursday that its XLS Enterprise Tape Libraries now feature single-key library managed encryption to eliminate the risk of data loss while tapes are in transit to disaster protection sites or other off-site locations.
XLS Enterprise Tape Libraries incorporating single-key library managed encryption are ready for immediate shipment.
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XLS single-key library managed encryption (SKLME) operates transparently to all data protection and archive software applications. It is incorporated in X-Link, the web browser based remote library manager that enables administrators to configure, upgrade, and monitor XLS libraries locally through an intranet, or from anywhere in the world over the Internet.
"Encryption key management is an important feature in our tape libraries because encrypted tapes are completely unreadable without the unique key used to create them," said Larry Firestone, Qualstar president and CEO. "XLS library managed encryption eliminates data loss if tapes are lost en route between facilities or disaster protection sites."
First enabled in Qualstar's RLS-8350 and RLS-8500 expandable Rack Mount Tape Libraries, SKLME allows administrators to assign a unique key to secure the tapes in each library partition. SKLME equipped libraries use customer-specified keys to access the AES 256-bit encryption capability built into every LTO 5 tape drive. Tapes and their encryption keys are interchangeable between XLS and RLS libraries, enabling users to economically architect a secure, enterprise-wide data protection plan.
XLS Enterprise Tape Libraries deliver data protection and archive solutions to a range of markets including government agencies, broadcast and entertainment companies, research institutes, colleges and universities, and industrial customers. Cost effective XLS solutions span capacities from 240 terabytes to over 17 petabytes.
XLS Enterprise Tape Libraries are available through Qualstar's global network of authorized resellers.

Proximal Data debuts AutoCache to reduce I/O bottlenecks, improve VM density

Proximal Data, provider of server-side caching solutions designed for virtualized environments, introduced Monday AutoCache, fast virtual cache software that eliminates I/O bottlenecks in virtualized servers to increase virtual machine (VM) density, efficiency and performance. AutoCache can increase VM density two to three times with absolutely no impact on IT operations, promising substantial savings in total cost of ownership.
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AutoCache was designed from the ground up to solve the VM density problem at the source — the virtualized server. I/O bottlenecks caused by slow disk access limit the number of VMs that can be deployed on virtualized servers. Consequently, as more VMs are added, the disk is unable to keep up with the increased I/O workload and performance hits a bottleneck. AutoCache increases VM density and efficiency while minimizing system resource usage, enabling idle CPUs to support more business applications.
AutoCache is simple to install, as it plugs into various hypervisors and transparently works on all I/O without requiring agents in guest operating systems. The first release of AutoCache supports VMware’s ESXi 4.1 and 5.0 hypervisors. AutoCache places the hot I/O into a PCIe flash card or SSD and intelligently supplies priority data traffic to VMs. AutoCache dynamically adjusts to changing workloads and will not impact high availability processes such as VMware vMotion.
AutoCache integrates VMware’s vSphere and vCenter management tools seamlessly and provides a single pane to view the performance of all VMs. Proximal Data’s powerful analytics reporting engine displays AutoCache’s results.
“AutoCache is the first server-side caching solution that was specifically designed to increase VM density in virtualized servers, and it’s the only solution that can back up its claim to have no impact on IT operations,” said Rory Bolt, CEO of Proximal Data. “With AutoCache, you simply plug it in, turn it on and, within minutes, I/O bottlenecks are relieved, performance is improved and more VMs can be added.”
AutoCache has been tested with some PCIe/SSD flash products from LSI and Micron Technology. They are the first PCIe flash card vendors with whom Proximal Data has formed a relationship to provide a joint solution for their customers.
“LSI and Proximal Data have combined their respective solutions to provide accelerated enterprise storage performance in a virtualized environment,” said Brent Blanchard, director of worldwide channel sales and marketing, LSI Corp. “Proximal Data’s AutoCache, when used with the LSI Nytro WarpDrive PCIe flash card, delivers explosive performance and scalability by lowering data access latencies and resolving the VM density issue that challenges virtualized environments. We are excited to bring this combination to our customers.”
“Micron is the performance leader in enterprise PCIe solid state storage,” said Ed Doller, vice president and general manager of Micron’s enterprise SSD Division. “When using Proximal Data’s AutoCache software in combination with Micron’s P320 PCIe solution in a virtualized environment, performance bottlenecks are removed, workloads are greatly improved and VM density is maximized.”
“Proximal Data has met a real customer need with performance improvements for server virtualization,” said Randy Kerns, senior strategist, Evaluator Group. “Accomplished with a software implementation that does not require agents or sophisticated setup, the caching improvements for storage access will allow users to increase their virtual machine density and virtualization of critical applications with minimal cost and complexity.”
“The initial reaction after our analysis of Proximal Data’s AutoCache software was ‘finally,’” said George Crump, president and founder, Storage Switzerland. “The most interesting capabilities of AutoCache are its rapid return on investment, its simplicity of implementation and its coordination at the hypervisor level. One can start seeing the benefits of SSD right now. Virtualized systems will be capable of supporting more VMs with existing storage infrastructures without sucking up critical system resources or adding more hardware.”
AutoCache is available now through Proximal Data resellers such as CMT, Harwood, BluechipTek and Condre. Pricing starts at $999 for cache sizes less than 500GB.

Nexsan announces availability of 4TB HGST Ultrastar enterprise-class drives

Nexsan, a provider of data storage systems, has announced immediate availability of HGST Ultrastar 4TB 7,200 RPM enterprise-class drives as an option for all Nexsan NST5000 Unified Hybrid Storage and E-
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Series SAN storage systems. The new high capacity drives take Nexsan storage density to new levels and with the reliability Nexsan delivers, are ideal for 24x7 enterprise applications such as big data, cloud computing, data warehousing, video-on-demand, disk-to-disk backup and virtualized computing.
The 4TB HGST Ultrastar drives provide significant capacity, reliability and performance and offer five Advanced Power Management modes for a low-power operation. HGST’s Ultrastar 5-platter design has been field proven and is an enterprise-class, 4TB, 7,200 RPM hard drive with a 2.0 million hours MTBF specification. The drives have a greater areal density for 33 percent more capacity and 24 percent lower watts-per-gigabyte than earlier 3TB models. When packaged with high-density AutoMAID-enabled storage systems by Nexsan, the resulting energy efficient solutions support capacity intensive IT applications in a highly reliable and efficient package.
“The data deluge continues to impact organizations with growth being driven by the rapid increase in unstructured data and emerging technologies such as big data,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST, a Western Digital company. “By qualifying and shipping Ultrastar 4TB drives in volume across their product line, Nexsan is wasting no time in delivering solutions that address this challenge head on.”
The new drives are available to ship with NST5000 Unified Hybrid Storage and E-Series SAN storage systems. Nexsan Unified Hybrid Storage systems leverage FASTier acceleration technology to intelligently optimize caching with DRAM and flash-based solid state memory, along with the new 4TB drives, to multiply real-world random IOPS up to 10X while supporting data rich environments. E-Series storage systems hold up to 60 4TB drives per 4U chassis for a 33 percent increase in capacity compared to previous models.
“Ultrastar 4TB drives deliver the capacity and reliability that organizations need along with the performance and efficiency they require,” said Victoria Grey, senior vice president of Marketing, Nexsan. “When deployed with NST5000 Unified Hybrid Storage and E-Series SAN storage systems, our customers enjoy the perfect blend of performance and industry-leading density for today’s transaction and data-intensive environments

Clustrix offers scale-out SQL DBaaS for Big Data applications with new cloud economics

Clustrix, a scale-out SQL database for Big Data applications, announced Wednesday high-performance SQL database offerings that deliver new cloud economics while addressing the real-time needs of customers building applications at the intersection of Big Data, cloud and agile development.
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Clustrix released a high-performance SQL database-as-a-service (DBaaS) that extends Clustrix's scalability, performance and availability to the cloud. The Clustrix DBaaS introduces simple, transparent pricing (www.clustrix.com/pricing) with no meters or limits on transactions, data size or number of users.
Public cloud platforms provide compelling development environments, but as applications scale in production, they have been plagued by unpredictable costs and undesirable complexity. The Clustrix DBaaS addresses these issues by providing lower and predictable pricing with no hidden surprises, with a 1TB fault-tolerant configuration priced 30 percent less than a similar Amazon relational database service (RDS) implementation, offering real-time access for applications with high transaction throughput for both simple and complex queries, real-time recovery from failures, providing fault tolerance and high availability with no operator intervention, and real-time application innovation with familiar SQL or key-value programming models and rapid insight into DB performance optimization.
In addition to its pricing approach, the Clustrix high-performance SQL DBaaS offers scale-out SQL DBaaS using Flash Storage (SSD), providing terabytes of capacity with quick read and write performance. The only self-healing SQL DBaaS with a true distributed architecture helps to avoid downtime, complexity and cost of master-slave approaches. The first to offer, included with the DBaaS price, database administration (DBA) on demand with an expert team of Clustrix support staff that works with customers to optimize database performance
"By offering our high-performance scale-out SQL database both as a service and as a private cloud appliance, Clustrix is bringing radical simplicity to the Big Data database market wherever customers want to run their applications," said Robin Purohit, president and CEO of Clustrix. "We overcome limitations of legacy database architectures and new in-memory databases that create pricing and TCO surprises as applications scale. In this way, Clustrix enables application developers to innovate using the power of SQL and exploit the new cloud economics, both in development and production."
Clustrix also announced Clustrix Version 4.0, an upgrade to its high-performance transactional SQL database. Version 4.0 offers a Dev-Ops management console with comprehensive system and query performance insight, Big Data backup that provides constant, extremely fast parallel backup and restore, regardless of database size, and native support for JSON documents, enabling agile, schema-less development without sacrificing transactions or consistency.
"Clustrix Version 4.0 reveals the smarts under the hood of our database," said Sergei Tsarev, CTO of Clustrix. "Because it is both application- and system-aware, version 4.0 lets developers and system administrators view application and database interactions, as well as overall system health and performance, with a new level of clarity. As a result, they will spend less time troubleshooting the database and more time optimizing applications to propel their businesses forward."
Early users of Clustrix Version 4.0 have already begun confirming the usefulness of the new version's management tools.
"The management capabilities provided to us by Clustrix 4.0 gave us new insight into query performance across the database, immediately detecting several long-standing bad queries that were dragging down our website performance," said Sanjay Kharb, director of Technical Operations for MakeMyTrip, a travel site. "We were able to find and fix these bad queries in the first 48 hours of installing the Clustrix solution."

nCircle announces PureCloud Enterprise to improve security visibility

nCircle, provider of information risk and security performance management, announced Thursday PureCloud Enterprise, a cost-effective, easy-to-use scanning solution that can help enterprises address the common gaps in security visibility. PureCloud Enterprise is available to all enterprises, and scan results can be can
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seamlessly integrated into nCircle Suite360 Intelligence Hub to provide users with a single view of security risk, consolidated reporting and analytics, and enterprise-class customer support.
“PureCloud’s secure, patent-pending cloud delivery makes it the only vulnerability scanning solution on the market that can scan an entire network, including systems behind the firewall, without installing complicated and expensive scanners,” said Brent Torre, nCircle cloud product manager. “No other vulnerability scanning solution offers the flexibility to perform comprehensive network scans from virtually anywhere at any time, and aggregate all scan results into a management system that prioritizes risk across extended corporate and partner environments.”
This low-friction scanning model makes PureCloud Enterprise the ideal solution for a wide range of enterprise applications including branch office scans for locations where hardware installation is impractical, or site-to-site VPN bandwidth is limited or unavailable, monitoring security risks associated with sharing business information with business associates, assessing the state of IT security and onboarding costs for merger and acquisition targets, and network perimeter scans of all Internet-facing systems.
“According to our research, at least 70 percent of the enterprise workforce operates from remote and branch offices, and we expect that percentage to continue to climb,” said Peter Christy, founder, Internet Research Group. “Clearly, a comprehensive security solution must be flexible enough to address remote locations, branch offices and supply chain partners. PureCloud Enterprise effectively addresses the requirements for this market.”
As outsourcing and supply chain complexity increases, online information exchanged between interconnected business partners has exploded. PureCloud Enterprise is the first vulnerability scanning solution that makes it possible to continuously monitor business associate security risks. With a low deployment cost and zero-footprint installation, PureCloud Enterprise dramatically increases visibility into third party security risks that may affect key enterprise security initiatives including protection of intellectual property and controlled access to sensitive business information and customer data.
PureCloud Enterprise pricing starts at $2,147.

GFI Software announces GFI Cloud to simplify small business IT

GFI Software announced Thursday availability of GFI Cloud, a platform for the delivery of cloud services via a Web-based user interface, accessible from anywhere with an Internet connection, at any time. GFI Cloud permits IT administrators within small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to manage their IT systems more easily and efficiently, freeing up time and resources so they can focus on higher value and more critical tasks.
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Initially, GFI Cloud will include GFI VIPRE Business Online, for delivery of advanced antivirus and anti-malware protection, and GFI Network Server Monitor Online, giving administrators the ability to monitor the health of their networks and optimize server and workstation configurations to improve performance.
In the coming months, GFI LanGuard technology will be added to the roster of services, helping IT security staff to automate software patching and vulnerability assessment via the same centralized Web portal. Additional services from the GFI Software product portfolio will be added in coming months as the company continues its investment in this revolutionary platform.
GFI Cloud gives SMBs with limited IT resources and budget easy access to GFI's award-winning solutions via a cloud-based portal that, in 10 minutes or less, lets them start to manage their whole IT network.
"With GFI Cloud we are integrating our on-premise security and infrastructure products in a unified cloud-based platform to enable IT administrators to manage their systems more easily and efficiently," said Walter Scott, CEO of GFI Software. "Many businesses have been hesitant to migrate core applications to the cloud because they are unsure about moving away from proven solutions on which they have relied to date. The beauty of GFI Cloud is that it is based on GFI's existing, tested and proven technology so users know they are getting a product in which they can have confidence from day one. GFI Cloud was built with simplicity in mind - these services can be up and running in 10 minutes or less so businesses with limited IT resources can easily and confidently deploy key security, asset tracking and network monitoring solutions in the shortest time possible."
The simplicity of GFI Cloud begins with the one-time installation of an agent that links each machine to the management console via the Web. Once connected, IT administrators log into the easy-to-use GFI Cloud console to manage essential GFI Software services on all workstations and servers intuitively from a single unifying interface. Regardless of location, the lightweight agent connects each machine to the GFI Cloud over the Internet. This enables administrators to manage PCs and laptops used by mobile or home-based employees as easily as those that are within their own sites.
"Traditionally, SMBs, especially those with limited IT resources, have not had access to these kinds of advanced solutions for various reasons – time constraints of their IT staff, low budgets and so on," continued Scott. "By offering these services through a Web-based interface and yearly subscription model, we're democratizing IT to a point where these businesses can gain the same level of network security and visibility as their enterprise counterparts."

Overland’s SnapSAN delivers SSD acceleration with business continuity

Overland Storage, provider of data management and data protection solutions across the data lifecycle, announced Wednesday its new family of SnapSAN solutions for high performance computing.
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Scalable to 288TBs, the SnapSAN 3000 and SnapSAN 5000 are fully redundant systems with 99.999 percent availability and set a new benchmark for enterprise level automation and performance capabilities. With an easy-to-use interface for performing transparent, non-disruptive data movement, the new SnapSAN features multidimensional tiers that maintain optimal performance and provisioning without IT intervention.
For enterprise class data protection without the high incremental costs usually associated with such capabilities, both products come standard with real time replication, volume cloning, snapshots and thin provisioning. Certified for Citrix, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware, both products also have built-in VMware API support, as well as a vCenter plugin for seamlessly integrated administration. Ideally suited for I/O intensive applications, virtualised and private cloud environments, and regulatory compliance, the new SnapSANs from Overland Storage allow administrators to quickly provision storage to meet application driven and compliance requirements.
"With the SnapSAN 3000 and 5000, Overland has brought many highly advanced storage features to the mid-market with an all-inclusive price model that is welcomed by customers. The advanced features are highly valuable and usually associated with much more expensive systems, " said Randy Kerns, senior strategist, Evaluator Group.
"Our new offering takes the SnapSAN family of products to unprecedented levels with industry leading features that provide the instant accessibility and the performance required for data intensive business applications," said Joe Disher, director, product marketing disk products, Overland Storage. "We continue to focus on creating solutions that provide our customers with maximum value and performance while maintaining the ability to be easily deployed and managed within their existing infrastructure."
The SnapSAN 3000 and SnapSAN 5000 are available immediately with a starting price of EUR11,499/£9,499 ex. VAT through Overland Storage's global sales channel.

IBM introduces virtual desktop flexible workplace offerings

IBM Corp. has announced a set of flexible workplace solutions that enable clients to create a simple, cost-effective environment that allows employees to use any device to access workplace applications anytime and anyplace.

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IBM SmartCloud Desktop Infrastructure solutions are designed to help clients get ahead of the rising trend toward employees bringing their own electronic devices to work. It allows organizations to manage desktops centrally while small or large numbers of users can access desk top applications from any location or device, including personal computers, tablets, smart phones, laptops and thin clients. The solutions were created to help clients escape the constraints of physical computing -- simplifying desktop management, tightening security, and enhancing overall employee productivity.
The IBM offerings support a range of industry hardware, software and virtualization platforms across various industries, including health care, education, financial services and retail, as well as the public sector, local, state and federal government agencies. For example, the 2,000-student Gilmer County, Texas Independent School District is using the offering to provide a more flexible workplace for teachers and administrators. The IBM SmartCloud Desktop Infrastructure solutions come fully-tested across hardware, software and services to help streamline IT administration and help take the guess workout out of the transition to a virtual desktop environment. The offerings were created in collaboration with various providers such as Citrix, Virtual Bridges and VMware.
Using IBM System x servers running VMware Vie software, The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. implemented a virtual desktop environment that included "Desktop Everywhere" to create an easy-to-use terminal. The bank started by replacing a virtual environment of 3,000 personal computers with Vie software.
According to Bank-of-Tokyo-Mitsubishi Senior Manager Mizuhiko Tokunaga, company studies showed that the virtual desktop offering offered two advantages -- support for more software types and the ability to prevent an application failure from bringing down the entire system.
"Our strong ecosystem of partners and robust, open-reference approach provide a range of time-tested virtual desktop solutions for multiple environments," said Adalio Sanchez, general manager, IBM System x business. "Together, we're able to bring the power of virtual computing to any size company seeking secure, end-to-end solutions that provide greater agility, reduced costs and complexity, while freeing up critical IT resources."
IBM SmartCloud Desktop Infrastructure solutions are also being used at Corporate Information Systems Company Asia Pacific, a division of Panasonic Asia Pacific Pte, Ltd. The IBM System x powered solutions are immediately available worldwide in configurations to match a client's individual desktop management requirements.

Carbonite debuts online backup reseller program, reinforces commitment to channel

 

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Carbonite Inc., provider of online backup solutions for consumers and small to medium sized businesses,
unveiled Thursday its new reseller program designed to help  its online backup resellers grow their businesses by providing  even more value to their clients with data protection and disaster recovery services.
"We see that value-added resellers (VARs) who target small businesses and consumers are currently an underserved market – most online backup services today are either too complicated or expensive for these resellers. The new Carbonite Reseller Program offers an easy-to-manage platform and low-cost pricing structure that is all stamped with Carbonite's signature ease-of-use for resellers and their clients," said Peter Lamson, senior vice president, small business and channels, Carbonite. "Whether a reseller is already competing in the cloud or just entering the large and growing cloud services arena, offering Carbonite online backup in their portfolio will boost their business."
The Carbonite Reseller Program delivers flexible account management tools for its resellers, and arms them with secure, affordable cloud backup that is easy to deploy and to manage for their clients. "This combination helps resellers manage their sales and most importantly, build their book of business," continued Lamson.
With the new Carbonite Reseller Program, cloud backup resellers can now offer Carbonite's complete line of Home and Business solutions – which includes Home, HomePlus and HomePremier for home or home office users, and Business and BusinessPremier for small business users. The complete range of solutions gives Carbonite online backup resellers more options to best meet their clients' varied needs. Another key benefit is that all of the solutions include Carbonite's anytime anywhere access feature enabling clients to access their backed-up content anytime, anywhere.
Carbonite resellers will benefit from a straightforward online platform designed for convenience and responsiveness. Resellers also gain access to a dedicated account management team and a dedicated senior Carbonite customer support team. New account management tools provide flexibility to help resellers easily manage their customer relationships, grow their businesses and maintain a recurring revenue stream.
The key features include complete utility to search for client accounts and view account details, purchase history, storage utilization and contact information, ability to add storage and renew subscriptions for customers, ability to upgrade customers to a higher plan, and weekly email status alerts that notify the reseller of client accounts that need attention.
Resellers that sold Carbonite through the company's previous program will find the added tools and flexibility in the new program help them support their clients and sell more services.
The PC DOCtectives in Marlborough, Massachusetts, has a range of clients, from home technology users to small businesses, and the firm includes Carbonite as a critical component of its maintenance service offering.
Cliff Bodenweiser, president of The PC DOCtectives said, "With other backup systems, you practically have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what's being backed up, and if you ever needed to retrieve files, forget about it. Our clients appreciate that they can easily see what is being protected with Carbonite and knowing that they can actually get it back, and at the end of a disastrous day, so do we."
Benjamin Brewster, owner of Corvallis Technical, an IT management firm for small businesses, said, "Carbonite has become a great profit maker for us. Customers like the continuity they get with continuous backup, and it means that we can provide more continuous, regular service." As Carbonite provides a continuous backup tool, Corvallis Technical has been able to sign up more customers for monthly services, rather than one-time technology implementations, Brewster noted.
Since joining the reseller program, Make It Work, a California-based firm offering in-home and on-site IT services, computer repair, and hard drive recovery, have enjoyed being able to offer backup in a way that's standardized, affordable and effective. Jack Davis, a remote technology consultant for the company, looks forward to even more capability through Carbonite's new reseller program. "We appreciate knowing that we can count on Carbonite. That gives us the ability to take care of our customers and build our business," said Davis.

Atlantis Computing debuts ILIO FlexCloud 1.0 for storage-intensive virtualized server, cloud applications

Atlantis Computing, provider of storage optimization software for virtual servers and desktops, unveiled this week Atlantis ILIO FlexCloud 1.0 at GigaOM Structure. The new software product makes it possible for
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enterprises and service providers to fundamentally change the performance and economics of storage-intensive virtualized server and cloud applications like databases, big data and custom enterprise applications.
"With our success in the desktop virtualization market, we are constantly asked by customers to bring to market solutions for virtual servers that optimize storage utilization like we do for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)," said Bernard Harguindeguy, CEO of Atlantis Computing. "With the introduction of Atlantis ILIO FlexCloud 1.0, we are demonstrating how our technology has the flexibility to deliver similar performance, cost and scalability benefits to server virtualization and the cloud."
Atlantis ILIO is a storage optimization software solution delivered for VDI in 2009 and is an enabler of VDI deployments in the world, including JPMorgan Chase, Colt, CBRE and Washington Trust Bank.
"When we first tried to deploy desktop virtualization, we ran into performance problems and weren't able to scale until we deployed Atlantis ILIO software to optimize how the virtual desktops use storage," said Chris Green, VP of IT Infrastructure at Washington Trust Bank. "Today every time we add virtualized servers, we have to purchase a lot more storage to ensure that we have enough capacity and performance available for the application. We look forward to extending our use of Atlantis ILIO technology to virtualized servers."
Atlantis ILIO FlexCloud 1.0 is application-aware storage optimization software that complements virtualization solutions from Citrix, Microsoft and VMware. The solution processes storage IO traffic within the hypervisor to decrease the amount of IO sent to storage and boosts application performance. As a result, storage is used more efficiently as less is needed for a given application, and more applications can be supported by the storage fabric.
Atlantis ILIO FlexCloud 1.0 can be configured to use server memory (RAM) as tiered storage enabling clustered applications that require processing massive amounts of data to operate efficiently in scale out shared storage environments.
Atlantis ILIO FlexCloud 1.0 identifies and maps storage IO traffic characteristics of application and responds intelligently based on patterns. It also eliminates duplicate write and read IO traffic to reduce the amount of storage traffic, and processes IO requests from the hypervisor so that processing occurs in memory instead of being serviced by storage resulting in improved overall performance. It also reverses the IO blender effect introduced with virtualization by transforming smaller randomized IO traffic into easier to consume larger sequential blocks to further boost network and storage efficiency. It also creates new virtual machine clones on demand using Atlantis ILIO without copying data from storage or introducing performance overhead.
Atlantis ILIO FlexCloud 1.0 is in private beta and is expected to be generally available this summer.

Bitcasa now in open beta, raises $7 million in Series A funding

Bitcasa, a cloud storage company that integrates infinite storage, sync, backup and share into desktops and across devices, announced this week that it has raised $7 million in its Series A funding round, bringing the
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total funding to $9 million. Pelion Venture Partners, an existing investor, and Horizons Ventures, a new investor, led the round, with Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, CrunchFund, and Samsung Ventures participating. Funds will be used to further accelerate the company’s impressive growth, shorten the time-to-market for upcoming storage and data management offerings, and expand sales and marketing. The company’s service offering is also now officially in open beta, and users can sign up online.
Founded by former MasterCard and Mozy employees, Bitcasa is changing the way consumers and SMBs are storing their data. By using client-side encryption and encrypted deduplication techniques, the Bitcasa virtual storage model integrates infinite storage, sync, backup and sharing across all of the devices for $10/month, offering users as much storage as need in the cloud without the hassle of managing local storage.
In the past few months, Bitcasa users in 120 countries saved more than four petabytes of data and uploaded more than 1 billion files to Bitcasa. The service uses client-side encryption, compression, and deduplication technologies to seamlessly integrate infinite storage into all of the devices. Users can now store, sync, backup and send infinite amounts of data without having to worry about management and capacity constraints. During the beta program, users can take advantage of the service for free; after beta, they can continue the access to infinite storage for $10 a month.
"As the seed investor, we have been impressed with Bitcasa’s efforts to solve the storage challenges that consumers and small and medium businesses face," said Carl Ledbetter, managing director at Pelion Venture Partners and a Bitcasa board member. "Bitcasa's infinite storage solution solves space, management, and security challenges for today’s users and has been well-received by the tens of thousands who have tried the service during its beta period. Bitcasa's solution goes far beyond services that provide only backup, synchronization, or large file sharing or movement; Bitcasa is the first and only service that provides unlimited storage of all of a user's files in the cloud, making the cloud-based virtual desktop a reality. This is the way we will all connect to our online, tablet, mobile, and PC-based environments in the near future, and Bitcasa is the defining step."
"I am glad to see the continued commitment of our initial investors, as well as the involvement of our new investors," said Tony Gauda, co-founder and CEO of Bitcasa. "This funding round shows that our investors recognize the potential that we have in this market and have been pleased with our progress. It is exciting to see the users' increased adoption of our infinite storage solution that helps them store and share more data than they could have ever imagined. We are working on more amazing features and are currently looking to bring on great talent to join our team."